sfcrazy writes: Ivan is the creator of Lancelot the application launcher which is used in a majority of GNU-Linux distributions. He says in an exclusive interview with Muktware — Personally, I never cared much about.NET (and thus Mono) for one simple reason — it wasn't created due to a market demand, it wasn't born because it was really needed..NET was created only as a competitor to existing solutions, namely Java.

In the Free world, we have a huge variety of programming languages, enough to never get a desire to even look at Mono. My preferred choice is always C++, and sometimes Scala if I want to feel peculiar. Apart from those two, I find C, Python and Java to be rather popular choices.

A correction: there was no technical necessity for.NET. There was a business necessity.

At the time.NET was announced, Microsoft was involved in various legal battles over the use of Java. It was completely unclear exactly what.NET was, but when it was announced, Microsoft also announced that it would replace the use of Java in terms of functionality. It was clear that whatever.NET was, it would give Microsoft clear and complete control of the stack without paying money to extra lawyers and competitor